The 2011 Email Evolution Conference was a blast! We learned a lot, met tons of fantastic people and loved getting away from the snow for a few days. The keynote speaker, Gary Vaynerchuk, was so full of energy I couldn’t wait to get back to the office to share my new visions for what email marketing should be.

Gary stressed that email isn’t dead, but we have broken it. We aren’t keeping it in the front of our minds that we are just people emailing other people. We are trying to market to them instead of building a relationship. Do we really know the people we are emailing, and what it is they want, or are we only concerned with what we want?

As the conference went on I tried to tie Gary’s words into each session I attended. It was easy to do, as the answer to most email marketing questions can be answered simply by knowing your subscribers. What is the best time to send? That is simple; what time do your subscribers respond to the best? What is the best template style to use? Another simple answer; what template do your subscribers respond to the best?

This year I will really be digging into my databases and studying my subscribers as never before. It is my mission to give them what they want the way they want it and to build better relationships with the brands. Ultimately, focusing on subscribers is not only the right thing to do; it is also going to drive conversions.

Here is how I recommend starting:

Who are your best/worst subscribers? Who is opening your emails religiously? Who isn’t opening at all? What do these groups have in common? Look at demographics, subscriber source and every piece of data you can get your hands on. If you aren’t collecting the subscriber source, you are missing a huge opportunity.

Develop a meaningful testing strategy. Don’t just test to test. Make sure you have a meaningful hypothesis before you commit to testing something. If you aren’t running monthly email marketing tests you need to start. I heard a lot of people ask questions at the conference that could be easily answered by a simple A/B test.

Run Smart Reengagement Campaigns. Put together a series of reengagement emails for those people that aren’t responding. They aren’t responding to your regular messaging, so it is time to test some new things on them to find out what they want. Once you get that subscriber back, don’t blow it by sticking them back in the general population again. Keep messaging to them separately and learn from how they respond.

Call Your Unsubscribers. This was Gary’s big radical idea. He hired a team of people to call each of his unsubscribers and converted 40% of them back to the email list. This is also a great chance to survey them and find out what they want from your emails. We all know it costs less to keep current customers than to acquire new ones. Gary suggests taking the budget from something “stupid” and using it to hire some people to call each unsubscriber.

In this economy, the subscriber-focused programs are the ones that are going to come out on top. No matter how you do it, you have to focus on getting to know your subscribers and to start to really care about developing relationships with them.